
Class 
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Copyright }I^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



ISitiersiflie CDucational ittonogmpl^jS 

EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
IN AND OUT OF SCHOOL 



WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE 




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COPYRIGHT, I91O, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






C.aA268^59 



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PREFACE 

In state and church, in family and school, all of 
us who are not anarchists agree that we must 
have authority. As soon, however, as we ask, 
"Where is its seat?" "In what spirit shall it be 
exercised ?" the world splits into opposing camps. 
The monarchists, the ecclesiastics, the tradition- 
alists, the conservatives, tell us that authority 
resides in official individuals, whose will must be 
imposed upon the masses by pains and penalties. 
Democratic Christianity, on the other hand, af- 
firms that authority, potential or actual, resides in 
all individuals whose interests are involved ; and 
that the ruler, the minister, the husband and father, 
the teacher are simply persons whose authority 
is based on their power to serve more intelligently 
and effectively the interests and aims, latent or 
expressed, in the minds and wills of all concerned. 
In the state, here in America at least, democ- 
racy has won ; in the church it is winning ; in the 
family it is meeting the reverses that forces fight- 
ing in a strange and open field against strong 

• • • 

ni 



PREFACE 

intrenchments must expect; in the school the 
skirmishing has scarcely begun. Yet the school 
is the point where the fight is sure to be fiercest. 
For in the school we have one, or at most a 
very few, mature, trained, experienced individ- 
uals on the one side, and a mass of the immature, 
the untrained, and the inexperienced on the 
other. Here, if anywhere on earth, is the place 
for ofiicial conservatism to dig its last ditch, and 
fight to the bitter end. 

Yet even here democratic Christianity has the 
right upon its side, and soon or late will win. In- 
deed, unless the school is to be out of the trend 
of modern civilization ; unless the teacher is to 
be the last surviving relic of an outgrown social 
organization, he too, like the ruler, the minister, 
the husband and father, must come down from 
his throne of officialism, and prove his right to 
rule by sympathetic and effective service of the 
common interests and needs. 

In the university this is the obvious thing to 
do, and already is the universal practice. In the 
college it is comparatively easy, though involving 
risks from which the timid shrink. In the high 

iv 



PREFACE 

school it is harder, though, with the aid of voca- 
tional interests, by no means difficult. In the 
grammar school it is extremely difficult, requir- 
ing enormous ingenuity to devise methods of 
making hard work and right conduct automati- 
cally preferable through artificial weighting of 
alternatives. In the primary school the problem 
is supremely arduous, requiring, in addition to all 
that is valuable in what the kindergarten has 
taught us, infinite tact and resourcefulness on 
the part of the teacher. 

Nevertheless, radical and revolutionary as 
these apparently meek and mild ideals are, and 
difficult and even dangerous as is their applica- 
tion, the first part of this book ventures to state 
them in uncompromising terms. One thing is 
sure. As Plato said about his ideal republic : 
" Not until philosophers are kings or the kings 
and princes of this world have the spirit and 
power of philosophy, will this our state have a 
possibility of life and behold the light of day " ; 
so we may be sure that not until our teachers are 
philosophers, and bring the fruits of a wise phi- 
losophy to their task, can schools be conducted 



PREFACE 

on these principles. Accordingly the second part 
aims to give the teacher such a sound and sane 
philosophy of life and work 

Good teaching, on its personal side, is simply 
democracy, Christianity, good-will, incarnate in 
the teacher, and diffused like an atmosphere 
throughout the school. How to put that into the 
school is told in the first part ; how the teacher 
is to get it into himself or herself is told in the 
second part. The order of development in the 
first part was suggested by Professor Ralph 
Barton Perry's " Moral Economy," published by 
Charles Scribner's Sons; the second part is a 
condensation and application to the problems of 
the teacher of my " From Epicurus to Christ," 
published by The Macmillan Company. The first 
part shows the teacher how to humble himself and 
become the sympathetic servant of his pupils ; the 
second part shows him how to exalt himself and 
become the rightful master of their free obedi- 
ence. 

William DeWitt Hyde. 

BowDoiN College, Brunswick, Maine, 
March 15, 1910. 



CONTENTS 

Preface iii 

Editor's Introduction Lx 

PART I. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

IN SCHOOL 

The Personality of the Pupil i 

The Primary School : Suggested Immediate 
Interests 4 

The GR.A.MMAR School : Artificially Weighted 
Interests 13 

The High School: Elected Individual In- 
terests 20 

The College : Social Interests 25 

The University: Professional Interests . ^y 

Five Tests of the Teacher 43 

PART IL THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

OUT OF SCHOOL 

The Personality of the Teacher .... 49 

The Epicurean: Happiness 54 



• • 



vu 



CONTENTS 

The Stoic : Fortitude . 60 

The Platonic: Serenity 65 

The Aristotelian: Proportion 72 

The Christian: Devotion 77 

Five Principles of Personality 81 

Outline 85 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

There was a time when the teacher, relatively 
speaking, was a more important factor in our 
educational consciousness. He was almost the 
only factor about which people disturbed them- 
selves. At least, we hear little in seventeenth 
and eighteenth century America of the problems 
of the course of study, the nature of the child, 
and the need of social adjustment on the part 
of the school. The one fact stressed in the organ- 
ization of a school was the teacher's qualities. 
The measure of the teacher was the measure of 
the school. In so far as he was learned, the cur- 
riculum was adequate ; in so far as he possessed 
a genial, resourceful personality, his methods 
were well adapted to the child; in so far as he 
was the embodiment of valid ethical standards, 
the school served the right social and moral ends. 
Society and child, course of study and teacher, 
were not regarded as separate factors, not even 
for the convenience of thinking. The public and 

ix 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

professional mind saw the whole of the school 
situation in the personality that was made mas- 
ter of the school. 

Since then, education has become vastly more 
self-conscious. Its consciousness has become sci- 
entific ; and one by one the factors in the school 
situation have been raised to the level of gen- 
eral law and guiding principle. Soon it was not 
enough that the teacher's personality should be 
orthodox in religion, politics, and morals ; he 
must have a scholarly command of the specific 
subjects he was to teach, and by the middle of 
the nineteenth century the movement for a 
larger scholarly or cultural attainment among 
teachers was in full swing. Later, another em- 
phasis and another movement directed attention 
to the need for a better understanding of the 
child as a condition of the educative process, 
and the close of the century saw " child study " 
and "educational psychology" occupying an im- 
portant position in the professional training of 
teachers. And now at the beginning of the 
twentieth century, the fullness of our political 
and social introspectiveness forces its way into 

X 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

the thinking of the schoolmaster, and school 
education begins to be determined on the basis 
of investigated social fact. 

Each new emphasis has been a clear gain. 
But each new movement has complicated educa- 
tional theory and stratified it. The result is that 
we have fallen into the way of thinking of teach- 
ing as so much applied course of study, or so 
much applied psychology, sociology, or ethics. 
We scarcely see teaching in terms of its own 
characteristic points of view or modes of action. 
Furthermore, the concentration of the profes- 
sional mind upon new factors has tended toward 
a subordination, if not an utter forgetfulness, of 
elements once clearly recognized. In the empha- 
sis of child, society, and course of study, the 
teacher has been forgotten. 

It is odd that in our effort to know more fully 
the nature of the elements in the educative pro- 
cess, we should have become less considerate of 
the personal human instrument through which 
the teaching is to be done. The personality of the 
teacher is as much a conditioning force as the 
mental make-up of the child, the nature of 

xi 



v/ 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

the school subjects, and the conditions and needs 
of modern life. It is more than a mere condition 
of school life : it is its active force, — stimulat- 
ing, guiding, encouraging, and applauding all the 
activities of childhood. Surely the human factor 
is worthy of some consideration, not upon human 
grounds alone, but for the purpose of efficiency. 
Yet, too often we hear of large, highly organized 
school systems where everything is prescribed 
by authority from above, subject matter and 
teaching method alike, without regard for the 
teacher's genius and limitation, the local situa- 
tion, or the shift of child interests. Is it to be 
wondered at that teachers feel that their indi- 
viduality is gone, that they have become mere 
tools without life ? What can teaching be under 
such conditions but " piece work " and " day 
labor" } And when the masters complain of the 
mechanics they have made (but neither taught 
nor consulted), saying that most teachers put no 
soul into their work and get no high spiritual 
result, have they forgotten that great beliefs are 
never carried into the world by the unbeliever ? 
At this point in our progress, we have no 

xn 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

larger need than for a philosophy of teaching, 
which unifies our modern complexities from the 
view-point of the teacher, and raises to attention 
again, in new and accurate ways, the nature of 
the teaching personality and the teaching life. 
Such we offer in this volume. 



PART I 

THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

IN SCHOOL 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

IN SCHOOL 

The Personality of the Pupil 

Over and above the lessons that he learns, or 
rather in and through them, the pupil is devel- 
oping his personality. The teacher, however 
harsh or stupid he may be, cannot altogether 
prevent this development ; but he may do much 
to repress or pervert it. On the other hand, the 
wise and sympathetic teacher can do much to 
make the growing personality strong, sweet, and 
pure. 

Personality develops through taking up and 
making over into an expression of itself, mate- 
rials which at first are foreign to it. To stimu- 
late, guide, restrain, and, without appearing to 
do so, for that very reason all the more effect- 
ively to control this development, is the teach- 
er's task. 

As a matter of fact, we recognize five stages 
in our educational system, — the primary, the 

I 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

grammar, the high-school, the college, and the 
university. All these stages involve this same 
process of taking up and making over into its 
own substance materials that the outside world 
presents ; and therefore in its broadest sense, 
the task of the teacher at all stages is the 
same. 

Yet the materials taken up, and the methods 
of appropriating them, are different at these dif- 
ferent stages ; and at each stage the problem 
assumes a special form. In the primary school, 
the teacher's problem is to suggest a series of 
immediate interests, which appeal to the play and 
imitative instincts which in these years are the 
child's chief forms of reaction on his environ- 
ment. In the lower grammar grades, play-work 
must give way to sustained efforts at tasks not 
intrinsically attractive, but which are made arti- 
ficially preferable through rewards bound up with 
them, and penalties attached to the opposite al- 
ternatives. In the upper grammar grades and in 
the high school, the individuality of the pupil, 
discovered by the teacher and revealed to the 
pupil as a plan they mutually and sympatheti- 

2 



PERSONALITY OF THE PUPIL 

cally share, is the most effective organ of ap- 
propriation. In college, the individual expands 
through sharing the thoughts and aims of other 
persons, presented both in literature and in life. 
In the university, professional interest, the de- 
sire to be a worthy exponent of some great de- 
partment of theory or practice, supplies the sole 
and all-sufficient motive. Without claiming that 
this correspondence is complete, the five stages 
of our educational system may serve at least as 
convenient hooks on which to hang the five 
principles of personal development. 

The one word which best expresses the growth 
of personality by feeding on the materials the world 
presents is interest. Accordingly, our five stages 
of development will appear as different forms of 
interest. The primary school is the sphere of sug- 
gested single interests, which appeal directly and 
attractively to the play instinct of the child. The 
lower grammar grades are the place for the 
maintenance of interests by artificially contrived 
rewards and penalties. The upper grammar 
grades and the high school are the place for the 
individual election of interests. The college de- 

3 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

velops the interest in other persons. The uni- 
versity develops the interest in truth for its own 
sake, and the mastery of its practical applications. 

The Primary School: Suggested Immediate 

Interests 

The problem of the primary school is to keep 
the children occupied in doing a succession of 
things in which they take eager interest, and 
find immediate satisfaction. This gospel of the 
play instinct, guided into profitable work without 
letting the child know where play leaves off and 
work begins, was the great contribution of the 
kindergarten. It is perfectly consistent with what 
is of permanent value in the kindergarten prin- 
ciple to substitute for the specific " occupations " 
and "gifts" of the traditional kindergarten, in- 
teresting activities which more directly lead to 
a mastery of the conventional tools of civiliza- 
tion. The kindergarten spirit applied to the tra- 
ditional primary -school subjects, as well as to 
the traditional kindergarten material, gives the 
ideal primary school. The essential thing at first 
is not knowledge of this or that subject ; but the 

4 



SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 

child's eager interest in what he is doing ; the 
power to pursue an end immediately before him, 
and choose the means, and do the deeds essential 
to attain that end. 

In order to take an intelligent interest in any- 
thing, the child must know the reality for which 
the symbol stands before, or at least at the same 
time, that he perceives the symbol. As Profes- 
sor Keith ^ well says : *' The great and crowning 
blunder and danger of school education is the 
effort to get children to imitate conventional 
activities for which they have no equivalent 
meanings. The movement in all primary educa- 
tion should be from the real activity — from the 
meaning — to the symbolical expression." 

Counting actual objects, putting them to- 
gether, taking some away from the rest ; putting 
piles of them together ; cutting them in pieces 
and counting the parts, should accompany the 
fundamental operations of arithmetic. Making 
a map of the school grounds should be an early 
lesson in geography. Reading something to 
others of which they are to get an idea should 

* Keith, Elementary Education, page 42. 

5 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

be an essential part of the reading lesson. Cor- 
respondence between the children should be a 
feature of lessons in writing and spelling. By 
these and similar devices the kindergarten spirit 
may be applied to the primary-school subjects ; 
and a school may be developed which is more 
sturdy and profitable than the traditional kinder- 
garten, and more interesting and vital than the 
traditional primary school. 

The first aim of the primary teacher should 
be to keep the children busy doing interesting 
things. Give a child four lessons to learn in a 
school day, and you will have trouble with him 
all day long, and he will learn next to nothing. 
Give him twenty different things to do, each re- 
quiring from five to fifteen minutes, and you will 
have very little trouble with him, and he will 
learn a great deal. Voluntary attention to a les- 
son for half an hour is a sheer impossibility. De- 
rived attention — attention, that is, derived from 
his interest in doing something — is the only 
kind of attention which he can long sustain. 

Now if the traditional kindergarten things are 
the only ones a teacher can clothe with this active 

6 



SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 

interest, by all means stick to them. But if a 
teacher, in the kindergarten method and spirit, can 
introduce reading, writing, geography, and arith- 
metic, why, the sooner it is done the better. The 
essential thing is to appeal to the will, not directly 
through the compulsion of authority, but indi- 
rectly through the attraction of interest ; and to 
sustain activity, not through fear of punishment, 
but through delight in doing interesting things. 
Keeping this principle ever in mind, it does no 
harm, but much good, to remember that some 
kinds of activity are socially more serviceable 
than others, and therefore educationally more 
fruitful. 

To secure the greatest personal development 
of the child at this stage, the will of the child, 
eagerly interested in doing something the teacher 
has wisely suggested, should be in the foreground, 
and the will of the teacher, which to be sure sug- 
gests and guides the interest, should be kept in 
the background. This, I am aware, is not the old 
theory of discipline, which has come to us through 
our Puritan inheritance. That theory was that you 
must break the child's will ; make him mind ; as- 

7 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

sert authority ; compel obedience as the founda- 
tion of all right conduct. I have set forth the ex- 
act opposite; that the first duty of the teacher is 
not to break but to strengthen the child's will ; 
to show him how to make the world mind him; 
to teach him to exercise his own authority over 
matter ; and train him to make the forces around 
him his obedient slaves. 

Here, surely, we are at the parting of the ways 
in our whole theory of education. One theory 
says, " Build up will " ; the other, '' Break will 
down." One says, " Master things " ; the other 
says, " Obey the teacher." Which is right ? Both 
have their measure of truth, as we shall see ; but 
the truth in the first is fundamental and essential ; 
the truth in the second is incidental and auxiliary. 
The first should be the teacher's normal aim and 
expectation ; the second is an occasionally neces- 
sary adjustment to abnormality. 

The aim of the good primary teacher is to keep 
the children doing a variety of things which 
must be interesting, and may be as profitable as 
is consistent with the maintenance of interest. 
The skill with which the child's interest in what 

8 



SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 

he is doing is developed and sustained is the 
test of primary teaching. For the power to main- 
tain persistent and concentrated attention is natu- 
rally lacking in the child at this stage. If the 
primary teacher passes on her children with ca- 
pacity for consecutive attention to interesting 
things, and the power to accomplish desired re- 
sults through persistent effort, she has done well 
her educational work. If the things which they 
are interested in, and therefore like to do and 
can do, are at the same time socially serviceable, 
that is so much clear gain. But the development 
of will-power through interest, in place of the 
naturally wandering, inconstant attention, and the 
wayward and capricious, and therefore unservice- 
able will, is the primary teacher's distinctive 
achievement. 

I know the reader is eager to interrupt at this 
point with the question. Must we not have disci- 
pline.^ Must we not enforce obedience .? Must we 
not compel the child to do dry, disagreeable 
things he does not like, and does not want to 
do ? Yes. We must have all these things, in one 
way or another, soon or late; but it is a very poor 

9 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

sort of primary teacher, and a pitiful sort of pri- 
mary school, that aims at them, or makes much 
fuss about them, or measures success by them. 
These things must not be absent from the school. 
But they should be in the background, not in the 
foreground. 

Discipline by force is not direct education ; 
but it is, at times, and with a minority of the 
children, a condition of education. Such disci- 
pline in school is precisely what the policeman 
and the jail are in the community. You must 
have your policeman and jailer to protect the 
community against the two per cent of its 
citizens who lack the normal domestic, eco- 
nomic, social, and civic interests in life. In the 
same way, there must be a policeman and jailer 
quality in every teacher ; and, figuratively speak- 
ing, there must be a billy, a pair of hand-cuffs, 
and a cell in every school. No school is any more 
safe without them, than a community. They are 
essential to the prosecution of its work; and they 
check bad habits, and induce good habits in the 
obstreperous individual. 

Furthermore, this background of inexorable, 

10 



SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 

impartial discipline must win on every issue it 
joins, and fight every battle, if need be, to the 
bitter end. In the rougher days of a generation 
ago, a young Bowdoin athlete was sent out to 
"keep school" in a district where three successive 
teachers had been put out of the building by the 
"big boys," who, after a long season of farming 
and fishing, attended the winter school. The com- 
mittee, in despair, made a contract with him 
which insured liberal pay in case he should keep 
school throughout the whole term of nine weeks ; 
but stipulated that he should receive no pay 
whatever, in case he failed to teach the entire 
term. On the first day, he locked the door, and 
put the key in his pocket. Then he took off his 
coat, folded it and laid it on the desk; next his 
waistcoat, folded that and laid it on the desk; 
finally his suspenders, deliberately folded them 
and laid them on his desk. Then he rolled up his 
sleeves, showing a powerful pair of arms. Thus 
introduced, he made his opening speech, in which 
he said : " Boys, I have taken this school on con- 
dition that if I teach for less than the complete 
term, I get no pay. I don't propose to waste my 

II 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

time here teaching for nothing. You have put 
out the last three teachers. If you want to try 
me, now is your chance. Come one, or come all ; 
but come now'' He kept the school, and drew 
his pay. 

Under those circumstances, he did right ; and 
every teacher must stand ready in spirit, if not 
in specific detail, to do likewise. Yet that was 
not education ; any more than clearing the wil- 
derness is raising crops. It was a preliminary to 
education, a condition of education, but not the 
thing itself. He simply subjected the brute force 
and the will behind it in the boys, to a bigger 
brute force and a stronger will in himself. He did 
not build up, strengthen, and confirm the boys' 
control over themselves, and over the things they 
had to do. 

We do not judge the good order of a city by 
the number of arrests. Some are necessary ; but 
too many are a confession that something is wrong. 
There must be some discipline active, and much 
more latent, in every school. But the less the 
better ; and the ideal is to have it all latent and 
none called out. While ideals are never perfectly 

12 



ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 

realized, yet they determine the tone and quality 
of our will-attitudes. Making all the concessions 
required by the strictest Puritan about the ne- 
cessity of discipline as a last resort always latent 
in the background, and occasionally a regrettable 
feature of the foreground, the ideal of the primary 
school is the strengthening of will, through inter- 
est. True as it is that there are hard and disa- 
greeable things which must be done, whether one 
likes them or not, the best preparation for them, 
at this primary stage, is the development of power 
to do things which one likes to do. That power, 
to be sure, must later be transferred to dry and 
disagreeable tasks. But the problem distinctive 
of the primary school is not the transmission of 
power to this or that particular machine or pro- 
cess ; but the generation of power which later 
can be applied wherever wanted. 

The Grammar School: Artificially Weighted 

Interests 

Now that the primary school has developed 
the power to follow for a considerable period a 
single interest of some difficulty and some im- 

13 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

portance, the grammar school must train the 
child to weigh one interest as compared with an- 
other; reject the lesser, and accept the greater, 
notwithstanding the temporary pains, privations, 
and difficulties the following of the greater inter- 
est may involve. 

As soon as we reach the grammar grade; as 
soon, that is, as we begin to give out lessons to 
be studied through half-hour periods by the chil- 
dren individually in their seats ; in other words, 
as soon as, instead of suggesting single lines of 
interest to them, we begin to place before them 
a task not immediately and intrinsically of com- 
pelling interest, but one which they can follow 
only by rejecting hosts of competing interests 
that are immediate and urgent, then the great 
moral conflict is on. 

In this great conflict, the tragic fact is that 
nature almost always backs the impulse which, 
from the social point of view, is the less valuable. 
Nature cares supremely at this stage for exercise, 
nutrition, play ; and expresses these physiological 
interests in restlessness, mischief, indolence, and 
wool-gathering. These physiological impulses, 

14 



ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 

backed by heredity, stimulated by environment, 
are intrinsically much stronger in their appeal to 
the child than such pale, bloodless conceptions 
as fractions, latitude and longitude, subject and 
predicate, and the other tools of civilization that 
the school is seeking to put into his hands. Now 
the child must choose between two things of un- 
equal value ; and the worst of it is that nature 
has given the less valuable competitor the inside 
track. Before the development of the doctrine 
of evolution, we used to put all the blame for this 
situation on the child himself, and label it " total 
depravity," and try to take it out of him by the 
rod. The child is not to blame ; and yet the child 
left to himself will choose the lesser good almost 
every time. 

At this stage, the teacher's task is clear. It is 
to lighten and brighten the larger good with such 
artificial encouragements, rewards, advantages, 
and attractions that, in spite of the pull of nature 
in the opposite direction, the child will choose 
that larger good which arithmetic, and grammar, 
and geography, and nature study, and drawing, 
and the other studies represent. It is to weight 

15 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

down restlessness, and inattention, and laziness, 
and inconsiderateness of all sorts with such auto- 
matic artificial penalties, and privations, and dis- 
abilities, that he will of his own preference re- 
ject them. 

Here again the teacher's will must be done ; 
but it must be done as far as possible by keeping 
itself in the background, and by bringing the 
child's will into the foreground. The wise teacher 
does not lay down the law arbitrarily, and then 
enforce her will directly against the will of the 
child. As before, in extreme cases, that may 
be necessary, and should always be held, like 
the policeman and the lock-up, in reserve. But 
it is not the ideal which the teacher should have 
in mind ; it is not the attitude she should cul- 
tivate. On the contrary, the grammar-school 
teacher should recognize as her distinctive task 
the lightening of the better and the weighting of 
the worse alternative, so that between the two 
scales, thus lightened and weighted, the child 
will make the right choice for himself, as a free 
act of his own will. 

It is no easy task by artifice thus to make the 

i6 



ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 

path of study the more attractive, and keep the 
children marching, breast forward, intent upon 
a series of goals just far enough ahead to let 
them draw encouragement from the prospect and 
not so far ahead as to be discouraging. Manual 
training is an immense help at this point ; for the 
thing to be done is ever in the future, yet so re- 
lated to present effort, and so dependent upon 
present industry, patience, perseverance, care- 
fulness, and thoroughness, that the vision of the 
completed product brightens and lightens the 
labor of the moment and the hour. The worker 
who cares for his work is always living " by the 
glad light of futurity," and unconsciously devel- 
oping the subordination of present inclination to 
future satisfaction. 

Frequent opportunity for special as well as reg- 
ular promotion ; and, in some way or other, the 
recognition of quality as well as quantity of work 
as the proper basis of promotion, is another de- 
vice which, besides being educationally and eco- 
nomically valuable, is of great assistance in de- 
veloping that eager forward look which ought to 
mark the children in a well-conducted grammar 

17 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

school. Nothing is more deadening than the lock- 
step by which good and bad, bright and dull, 
ambitious and listless, are marched through the 
grammar grades. It is convenient for the school, 
but costly and deadly for the scholars. If the boy 
is made for the school, this lock-step, with only 
one regular annual promotion, is all right. If the 
school is made for the boys and girls, it is utterly 
wrong. Some things taught in the grammar 
school, like mathematics, are of such a nature 
that unless he knows thoroughly what is taught 
in the lower grade, the child cannot successfully 
take up the work of the next higher grade. For 
instance, the subject of interest could not be 
profitably taught without acquaintance with deci- 
mal fractions. 

On the contrary, most of the subjects taught 
in the grammar grades are not of this nature. A 
bright boy who has studied the geography of 
Europe, can take up the study of the geography 
of Africa with a class which has studied the 
geography of Asia, even though he has not. The 
ambitious boy should be encouraged to skip one 
or two of the grammar grades; and provision 

i8 



ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 

should be made toward the end of the term for 
his concentration on the essential features of the 
work of the class just ahead of him, which he is 
about to skip. 

It is not the economic or even the strictly 
intellectual gains — important as these are — 
that I am chiefly commending. It is the moral 
attitude encouraged by frequent promotion. It 
is the placing of a portion of responsibility 
for the child's progress upon the child himself. 
Frequent promotion, the counting of quality, 
as well as quantity, as a ground for promo- 
tion, develops prudence instead of indifference; 
eagerness instead of listlessness ; ambition in- 
stead of sloth ; responsibility instead of irre- 
sponsibility. 

Manual training and frequent promotion are 
matters of administration, and depend mainly 
upon the superintendent. There is a large field, 
however, which depends almost exclusively upon 
the teacher. Given the same subjects to teach, 
one teacher will contrive to hold up ideals, to 
hold out inducements, to create the expectation 
of satisfaction in achievement, which makes pre- 

19 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

sent toil glow with the ardor of future delight in 
the thing accomplished; while another teacher, 
less resourceful, will make the same subjects a 
dead lift by sheer force of will under slavish com- 
pulsion. Not external results alone, but the sense 
of freedom which the children have in achiev- 
ing them, are the test of good grammar-school 
teaching. 

The High School: Elected Individual Interests 

With the dawn of adolescence, individuality 
appears; and then wise choice is not between 
things which appeal to everybody as greater or 
less, better or worse, but between what appeals 
to me, with my capacities, tastes, aptitudes, and 
preferences, and what does not appeal to me. 
Here the boy is different from the girl ; the fu- 
ture artisan from the future artist ; the future 
lawyer from the future engineer. Here ought to 
come, if possible, industrial and commercial, as 
well as merely literary training; that the student 
may learn by a fair trial where his deepest affin- 
ities lie. Here the elective principle is essential. 
Here the choice whether to go to college, or to 

20 



ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 

a technical school, or into mechanical or com- 
mercial pursuits, must be provisionally made. 
Here the high school has a just grievance against 
the colleges, in so far as the rigidity and amount 
of college requirements interfere with opportunity 
to try a student out in lines other than mathe- 
matics, languages, and theoretical science ; or to 
turn aside from prescribed work to follow out 
interesting applications of mathematics and sci- 
ence to practical affairs. 

The principal of a Boston grammar school, in 
a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, went so 
far as to advocate the appointment in every school 
of a vocational teacher, whose sole duty should 
be to consult with the individual students, ascer- 
tain their bent and power, and direct them into 
those studies which would lead them to the choice 
of the vocation for which they are best adapted. 
So extreme a suggestion is hardly practical. But 
every teacher in the upper grammar grades, and 
in the high school, ought to help his students to 
discover their own capacities and form plans of 
life according to them. The teacher in the upper 
grammar grades, and in the high school, may 

21 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

take it for granted that every student in the school 
is reaching out, more or less blindly, but eagerly 
and intently, to find that aspect of the many-sided 
world with which he or she has the deepest af- 
finity, and that career in life which will prove 
most useful and enjoyable. 

Influence at this stage cannot be wholesale, 
but must be individual and personal. The high- 
school teacher who knows only the school or 
class as a whole, does not know either school or 
class at all. The teacher's philosophic task at 
this stage is to discover and reveal to the youth 
his undiscovered, longed-for self. This self does 
not lie upon the surface ; and, if sought directly, 
will dive down far out of reach. It is discovered 
through the discovery of special aptitude where 
that exists ; through the discovery of what the 
youth admires in others ; and still more, through 
the formation of tentative plans. These plans 
which youth forms at this stage may or may not 
be exchanged for other and better plans later, 
but some plan the youth at this stage ought to 
have ; and it is through that plan, and loyalty to 
it for the time being, that his salvation at this 

22 



-i' 



ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 

stage is best worked out. The future of the 
youth is much more subject to the influence 
of the parent and teacher then than either be- 
fore or after. Before this period, influence is 
easy and superficial. After that time it may be 
profound, but it is difficult. The high-school 
teacher who knows his students individually, 
and leads them to the recognition of their deeper 
selves, is almost omnipotent for determination of 
both career and character. 

I have in mind a principal who has been at 
the head of two academies and one city high 
school. From whatever school he has served as 
principal, there has come to college a steady 
stream of well-prepared and earnest students who 
know why they are coming to college. When he 
goes to a school, the stream starts ; and when 
he leaves, unless he is followed by a like-minded 
successor, the stream dries up. I do not mean 
to say that college is the best thing for every 
high-school student ; but it is one of many good 
things, and it is within reach of many who 
would never attain it without a wise teacher's 
encouragement. I have no doubt this same 

23 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

teacher is sending equally thoughtful students 
into business and mechanical pursuits with en- 
thusiastic devotion to the vocation for which 
they are best adapted. 

The teacher who, in the high school, will do 
this work of revealing the student to himself, 
and discovering his individual purpose, must of 
course have a purpose of his own. Unless one 
has chosen teaching because that is what he 
feels specifically designed and drawn to do, he 
will hardly have power to lead others into what 
shall be to them an equally noble and enjoyable 
career. You can never discover the true self in 
others unless you have found and worked out 
your own. The true high-school teacher finds 
his crowning opportunity in revealing to his 
students some appealing career and compelling 
purpose which shall be to them what teaching is 
to him. 

Where this mutual understanding based on 
recognition of the student's purpose is present, 
discipline solves itself; or rather the necessity 
for it disappears. Where this fails, communi- 
cation with parents is the next best resource. 

24 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

Here, as everywhere, there must be in the back- 
ground compulsion or expulsion as a last resort. 
But the ideal resource of every teacher fit to 
teach in high school or upper grammar grades, 
is the student's developed purpose, sympatheti- 
cally shared. 

The College: Social Interests 

We have developed a will strong enough to 
seek persistently a single interest, a will wise 
enough to choose the bigger of two competing 
interests, a will sufficiently individual to resist 
the greater which is not one's own for the sake 
of the lesser, provided that lesser interest ap- 
peals to specific capacity and taste. All this, 
however, is consistent with a very mean and selfish 
attitude toward others. The next problem is to 
develop a will which, as a matter of course, takes 
account of the aims, interests, rights, prefer- 
ences, and points of view of other persons, and 
includes them in the social interest one makes 
his own. To train men to recognize these social 
interests is the specific task of the college. . 

The college develops this social will in two 

25 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

ways : First, by the subjects in its curriculum. 
First of these is literature, and especially the 
literature of lands and ages other than our own. 
To read good literature is the best way of ac- 
quiring the habit of living in the minds and hearts 
of other people, and learning how to take their 
point of view. Of course when literature is made 
a mere pretext for grammatical, linguistic, and 
philological study, all this is lost. The tendency 
in this direction, which we imported from Ger- 
many a generation ago, and, to some extent have 
reinforced in our own graduate schools, if allowed 
to flourish would be the death and destruction of 
the college. Unfortunately, the great wave of in- 
terest in physical science which swept over the 
world a generation ago under the lead of men like 
Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, frightened and 
spoiled a great many of our college professors of 
literature. Forsaking literature as literature, and 
devoting themselves to philology and grammar, 
they substituted for the warm and breathing 
life of Greek, Roman, and European letters the 
dry roots and dead branches of the most dis- 
mal of pseudo-sciences. If we desire to preserve 

26 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

the college and hold it to its true purpose of 
developing the social will in men, we must re- 
sist, as we would poison and the plague, this 
tendency to degrade literature into the mere 
material of science, and put the classification 
of dead symbols above the appreciation of the 
states of mind and heart these symbols are 
meant to express. 

A man may go through the philological dis- 
cipline at present required for the degree of Doctor 
of Philosophy without losing the power of appre- 
ciation and creation ; many, however, are ruined 
in the attempt. At present there are not enough 
who have survived the process to fill a quarter 
part of the chairs in literature. The spirit 
and the letter are both desirable when they 
can be found in happy combination ; but for 
strictly college purposes, the man who has the 
spirit of literature without the letter of philology 
is infinitely preferable to the man who has the 
letter without the spirit. Perhaps, as the Dean 
of Dartmouth College has told us in an article 
in the Educational Review on "The Critical 
Period for the American College," the greatest 

27 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

problem of the college administrator at the pre- 
sent day is to protect his faculty against the in- 
vasion of the latter type of man. 

Philosophy, history, and political science come 
next to pure literature in their value for the de- 
velopment of social interests. To think out the 
problems of life in the terms in which the master 
minds have thought of them ; to read through the 
deeds to the motives of the men who did them ; 
and to discover the processes which have made 
and un-made institutions and customs, are all 
exercises in the art of acting outside our in- 
dividual selves, and taking the social, national, 
world-wide point of view. 

The physical sciences, — physics, chemistry, 
biology, geology, psychology, and astronomy, — 
as they are presented in the elementary college 
courses, are also a training in the appreciation of 
scientific men and their achievements. In each 
department, one or two advanced courses may 
pass beyond this attitude of appreciation, and 
enter on strictly scientific research. That, how- 
ever, is the distinctive province of the university. 
The great bulk of college teaching, even on 

28 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

strictly scientific subjects, is directed toward the 
enlarging and humanizing of the student, rather 
than the enlarging and utilizing of scientific 
knowledge. Broadly speaking, subject only to 
occasional exceptions in a few advanced courses, 
the college curriculum is determined by the fit- 
ness of the subjects which enter into it to stim- 
ulate and develop the social interests of the 
students. 

Secondly, the college trains its students in so- 
cial interests through the life they lead with each 
other. One cannot live three or four years with 
several hundred other youth in the pursuit of 
congenial studies, in class and fraternity affilia- 
tions, in athletic and literary contests which call 
out loyalty to comrades and strenuous opposi- 
tion to temporary foes, without learning that an- 
other person's will is as real as one's own, and 
that the likes and dislikes, the whims and preju- 
dices, the sentiments and aspirations of other 
persons are facts as real and as necessary to 
reckon with as brick and stone. 

By these two methods of prolonged and vital 
appreciation of literature, philosophy, history, and 

29 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

science on the one hand, and intimate, intense 
contact with persons as persons on the other, 
the college makes genial, generous, tactful, influ- 
ential, effective persons out of the young men 
and women who come to it. 

In fact, in these days, our one fear is that we 
may do this work too well. The danger is that 
we make our graduates so genial and generous,, 
so companionable and comfortable, that they may 
lose some of that sturdy independence and self- 
centred individuality which the right sort of 
high school develops, and which is essential to 
the highest forcefulness and the largest achieve- 
ment. As soon as boys catch the real college 
spirit, the power of merely individualistic mo- 
tives over them becomes greatly diminished. One 
reason why athletics, fraternities, college papers, 
and college functions appeal so strongly to them 
is that in all these things they seem to be serving 
the larger social rather than the narrower pri- 
vate self. It is highly desirable, yes, imperative, 
to get intellectual achievement and intellectual 
honors back into the focus of the student's atten- 
tion, and present them as attractive objects to 

30 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

his will ; but if we ever succeed in doing this, it 
will not be by reviving the old and out-grown ap- 
peal to his mere individual and selfish ambition : 
we shall have to appeal to him as a member of 
his family, his class, his fraternity, his college, his 
community, his profession, his country; and show 
him that intellectual achievement has a social 
value, renders a public service, and reflects honor 
on something more than his mere individual self. 
To find and work these new motives will doubt- 
less require no little enterprise and ingenuity; 
but it is some gain to see clearly and precisely 
where the difficulty lies, and it is some comfort 
to know that even the present tendencies in col- 
lege which we most deplore have a secret root of 
goodness underneath them, and are merely mis- 
applications of the very principle which it is the 
distinctive province of the college to develop and 
utilize. 

Here, as in lower stages, discipline will be 
present in the background, automatic, impartial, 
inexorable, to exclude the incorrigible few who 
are incapable of appreciating and improving 
that perfect freedom both in study and in life 

31 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

which is the only atmosphere a college which is 
to develop the social will can breathe : but the 
appeal of the college, both in study and in life, 
will be through freedom, not constraint ; it will 
be the presentation of rich, varied opportunity, 
and an appeal to the student to make the most 
of it. 

While this development of the social will is 
the peculiar province of the college, and nothing 
short of the college, as a rule, can develop it into 
that intense second nature which is indispensable 
for the highest business, political, and social 
leadership, anticipations of it are possible and 
desirable in the high school and the grammar 
school. Indeed, as far down as the kindergarten, 
all exercises that involve cooperation and all train- 
ing in regard for the rights of others and the con- 
ditions of common welfare so far forth are means 
of training in the social will. The prefect system 
and the school city, all cooperative undertakings, 
all delegated duties, all associations for musical, 
athletic, and kindred purposes in the schools are 
developments of the college spirit ; every insight 
into human character and motive imparted in a 

32 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

lesson in reading or history, is a training in the 
social will. Some high schools, like the Univer- 
sity High School of Chicago, find it possible to 
maintain almost as complex and highly developed 
a set of social activities as a college. In the 
schools, however, these activities require con- 
stant direction and supervision : they need to be 
kept very strictly to the special end of athletics, de- 
bating, or music, which is their avowed purpose. 
The secret fraternity in the high school is an 
abomination not to be tolerated. Young persons 
are not sufficiently developed to organize a 
wholesome social life of their own and maintain 
it for its own sake. As sure as they attempt it, 
the worst impulses and instincts in them will 
gain the upper hand, and make the fraternity the 
source and centre of demoralization. It is difficult 
enough to hold these fraternities to their legiti- 
mate ends in a college ; in a school it is as a rule 
impossible. 

Just as the study and life in the school may 
anticipate many of the valuable features of college 
study and life, so the attitude of the teacher in 
the grammar and high school may embody much 

33 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

that is most valuable in the attitude of the college 
officer toward his students. The college officer 
should always include the point of view of the 
student in his treatment of him. This is essen- 
tial to the teacher's successful discipline in any 
grade. As long as the student feels that you 
understand him, appreciate his good qualities as 
well as his bad qualities, make due allowance for 
his weakness and temptation, and give due weight 
to his peculiar point of view, you can say any- 
thing to him, however harsh ; you can do anything 
to him, however severe ; and he will not resent 
it. The men you treat most severely will be your 
best friends ; for they know their failings as well 
as you do, and are willing to acknowledge them. 
If, along with their failings, you know and recog- 
nize their better side, they will appreciate you as 
their friend even when the attitude you are com- 
pelled to take toward their conduct is uncom- 
promisingly hostile. On the other hand, if you 
have not acquired this power to see and appre- 
ciate others as they really are, and to include 
their point of view in your own, you will find it 
impossible to live with them in peace on any 

34 



SOCIAL INTERESTS 

terms. If you are kind to them, they will despise 
you as weak, and try to take advantage of you ; 
if you are unkind to them, they will resent it as 
an intrusion and set you down as a brute. Not to 
be understood by the person who undertakes to 
deal with him in any way is, to the student's 
mind, the only unpardonable sin. However bad 
he may be, however wrong his acts may have 
been, as long as there are good sides to his 
nature which you do not discover and appreciate, 
he will regard you in his inmost heart as an alien 
and an enemy ; as a smaller, lower person than 
himself; as his moral and spiritual inferior. In 
this harsh judgment that he will pass upon you, 
the worst of it is that he is absolutely right. To 
deal with persons as though they were things ; 
to deal with the acts of a person as though those 
acts were the whole personality ; not to under- 
stand a person with whom you presume to deal, 
— this is indeed the teacher's unpardonable sin. 
Whoever lacks that social insight and tact ought 
either to set about acquiring it in earnest, or re- 
sign at once. That person has no more business 
to be teaching young persons than an infant has 

35 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

to be playing with loaded guns or dynamite 
bombs. 

Now I do not mean to say that college is the 
only way in which this power to include others in 
one's self may be acquired. I simply say that it 
is one way, and, as the best colleges are at present 
conducted, an almost universally successful way. 
The best substitutes for college are simply the 
two things for which the college primarily stands. 
If you can read and enjoy, either by yourself, or, 
better still, with one or two congenial friends, 
the great dramas, poems, novels, biographies, and 
histories, you may acquire this distinctive college 
quality in this way ; or, if you have the good for- 
tune to be born in a large family, if you live in 
close and intimate association with a group of 
comrades, you may acquire it in that way. In 
some way or other, you must acquire this quality 
if you are to be a successful teacher. I suspect 
that when superintendents and committees insist 
on college men and women in certain school po- 
sitions, they have in mind this insight and tact 
gained by personal intimacy with others, either 
in literature or life, quite as much as the specific 

36 



PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 

and scholastic accomplishments for which a col- 
lege diploma stands. One cannot teach at all 
who does not know his subject ; one cannot teach 
well who does not know his students ; and one 
cannot know his students who has not previously 
known intimately and appreciatively scores of 
other persons, either in literature or life, or pre- 
ferably in both. 

The college, then, stands for the will that in- 
cludes other wills in its own, and deals with per- 
sons as persons, not as things. It represents in 
a broad way that justice based on the recogni- 
tion of mutual rights in the society of equals 
which was Rome's great contribution to the 
world. It contributes something which it is not 
well for any teacher to be without ; for good teach- 
ing is the bringing together of two terms, the sub- 
ject and the student ; and the teacher who lacks 
this college quality, however much he may know 
about his subject, can never know his students. 

The University : Professional Interests 

Now that we have provided the student with 
the power to pursue a single interest ; to choose 

37 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

the larger interest ; to express himself in his in- 
terests ; and to recognize and treat other persons 
as persons, and include in his own will the wills 
of the persons with whom he lives, only one fur- 
ther step remains : that is, to see and obey the 
universal system of interests which is expressed 
in the laws of nature, and coming to expression 
in the history and institutions, the thoughts and 
ideals of men. To teach men that there are facts 
independent of our caprice or choice, and that 
these facts have laws which it is our glory to dis- 
cover and obey — this field of pure science is 
the distinctive province of the university. Not 
what I like, not what other people like, but what 
is, forms the subject of university study. The 
difference between the university attitude and 
those which have preceded it is happily illustrated 
by a conversation between President Oilman 
and Professor Sylvester, the great mathematician. 
They went to the opera one evening, but Profes- 
sor Sylvester took apparently no interest in what 
was going on. As they were coming out. Presi- 
dent Oilman asked him how he enjoyed the 
opera. Professor Sylvester said, **I became in- 

38 



PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 

terested in a mathematical problem and forgot 
all about the opera." Then he went on to de- 
scribe a remarkable discovery he had made. 
When he had finished, President Gilman said to 
him, "Do you not wonder at the powers of your 
own mind?" "No," replied Professor Sylvester, 
"but I wonder that these things are so." The 
emphasis here, you see, is not, as in the high 
school and college stages, on the individual and 
the development of his powers, but on facts ex- 
pressed in law. Now the function of the uni- 
versity is to make its students bow before the 
authority of fact, and through obedience to the 
laws of fact, become masters of those depart- 
ments of knowledge and those practical vocations 
in which these facts and their laws apply. Once 
some department or vocation is selected, that 
subject becomes supreme. The teacher now 
withdraws still farther into the background, and 
leaves the student with his subject to work out 
his own salvation. If he succeeds, that is his own 
affair ; if he fails, the responsibility rests with 
him alone. Sometimes this highest appeal works 
miracles where lower appeals have proved in 

39 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

vain. Boys who have been listless in the lower 
schools, lazy in the high school, indifferent or 
worse in college, sometimes wake up into eager 
and earnest intellectual life, when brought face 
to face with the compelling power of some great 
department of truth, and the serious responsi- 
bility of some great profession. 

One acquires this professional spirit, whether a 
university student or not, whenever he passes be- 
yond the mere repeating of what books or other 
teachers say, and comes into first-hand contact 
with a subject, — reading it up ; thinking it out ; 
discovering new facts about it, and making it so 
completely his own, or rather surrendering him- 
self so completely to it, that it speaks through 
him and therefore gives to what he says the note 
of authority. No man is a scholar as long as his 
ideas have been merely heard from another, and 
have not in this vital way been made his own. The 
test which the university imposes is a thesis which 
contains an original contribution to the sum of 
human knowledge. 

While the research of graduate students, es- 
pecially in the department of literature, has often 

40 



PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 

been woefully misdirected, nevertheless, the test 
of original contribution is right and essential. No 
man is a scholar until he has dug the ore of truth 
with his own hand, out of the exhaustless mine of 
fact, and put the stamp of his individuality upon 
it. The bit of truth mined may be small ; but the 
processes of mining and minting are essential to 
the rank and title of the scholar: and the only 
possible proof that the man has done the min- 
ing is the product he brings back. 

What the graduate school of a university ought 
to produce, but what no American university 
to-day is producing, or even intelligently aiming 
to produce, is the Doctor of Philosophy. To be 
sure every year scores of men and women with the 
letters Ph. D. after their names are turned loose 
on much-to-be-pitied classes of undergraduates. 
But in reality they are not Doctors of Philosophy 
— men and women with vital individual apprecia- 
tion, fresh personal interpretation, enthusiastic 
power of communication of those portions of the 
world's great accumulated treasures which have 
proved a joy and inspiration to themselves. 

On the contrary, in spite of the misleading 

41 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

letters after their names, they are for the most 
part mere doctors of science — specialists in some 
narrow field of remote and minute research ; not 
only impotent to transmit to others, but incapa- 
ble of grasping for themselves the broad, human 
significanbe of the departments of literature, 
history, or science which they "profess " to re- 
present. 

Enough research to acquire its methods and 
appreciate its standards is doubtless an essential 
part of a university training. But from the point 
of view of the proper preparation of teachers for 
school and college, it is at present enormously 
overdone. For the purposes of the teacher a few 
ounces of appreciation and interpretation of the 
large features of our common intellectual heri- 
tage, are worth many pounds of newly discovered 
but unimportant information. 

The teacher's profession is the taking of some 
portion of our intellectual inheritance, and passing 
it on to the coming generation. To do that well, 
he must know how his subject arose and developed 
into its present form, with the same thoroughness 
that the physician knows his anatomy, the lawyer 

42 



FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 

his precedents, and the engineer his strength of 
materials. In whatever grade a teacher serves, this 
sense of having some grasp of the subject, or 
some art of its presentation, which he has worked 
out for himself — some touch of the university 
attitude, in other words — is essential if his work 
is to rise to the dignity of a profession, and he is 
to have in it the professional spirit. 

Five Tests of the Teacher 

Such are the five stages of education, and the 
five corresponding types of interest. As I said at 
the outset, the correspondence is not complete ; 
the stages overlap ; every school has some students 
who failed to learn the lessons of the stages below ; 
and others who are ready to learn the lessons 
of the stages above. 

On the whole, however, these five types of in- 
terest develop successively in the educational 
system. The teacher should use them all. The 
tests of a good teacher are five. 

First V Is my interest in my work so contagious 
that my pupils catch from me an eager interest in 
what we are doing together t Then I have the 

43 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

primary teacher's quality, essential to success 
there and everywhere. 

Second : Is my work thorough and resourceful, 
rather than superficial and conventional, so that 
the brightness of my industry and the warmth 
of my encouragement kindles in my pupils a re- 
sponsive zeal to do their best, cost what it may ? 
Then I have the grammar school teacher's essen- 
tial quality, without which no one can teach any- 
where aright. 

Third : Do I get at the individuality of my 
students, so that each one is different to me from 
every other, and I am something no other person 
is to each of them ? Then I have the high school 
teacher's special gift ; and shall be a power for 
good all through my students' lives. 

Fourth : Do I treat them, and train them to 
treat each other, never as mere things, or means 
to ends ; but always as persons, with rights, aims, 
interests, aspirations, which I heartily respect 
and sympathetically share ? Then I have the col- 
lege quality ; and am sure to be popular and suc- 
cessful everywhere. 

Fifth : Am I so reverent toward fact, so obedi- 

44 



FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 

ent to law, that through me fact and law speak 
and act with an authority which my students in- 
stinctively recognize and implicitly obey ? Then 
the mantle of the university, and a double por- 
tion of the professional spirit has fallen upon me ; 
and wherever I teach, the problem of discipline 
for the most part will solve itself through the 
mutual recognition by both students and teacher 
of a Power greater than either and higher than 
all. 



PART II 

THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
OUT OF SCHOOL 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
OUT OF SCHOOL 

The Personality of the Teacher 

Some people can teach school and other people 
can't. Some teachers have good order, as a mat- 
ter of course, as soon as they set foot in a school 
class-room. Other teachers can never get any- 
thing more than the outward semblance of deco- 
rum, try as hard as they will ; and often cannot 
get even that. Some teachers the scholars all 
love. Other teachers they all hate. 

Some teachers a superintendent or president 
will jump at the chance to secure after a five 
minutes' interview. Others, equally scholarly, 
equally experienced, equally well equipped with 
formal recommendations, go wandering from 
agency to agency, from one vacant place to an- 
other, only to find that some other applicant has 
secured or is about to secure the coveted posi- 
tion. 

For twenty-five years I have had to employ 

49 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

teachers every year, and to recommend teachers 
to others. I have seen many succeed, and some 
fail. But I have never seen a success that could 
be accounted for by scholarship and training 
alone. I have never seen a failure that I could 
not account for on other grounds. What is it, 
then, that makes one teacher popular, success- 
ful, wanted in a dozen different places ; and an- 
other, equally well trained, equally experienced, a 
dismal failure where he is, and wanted nowhere 
else ? 

The one word that covers all these qualities is 
personality ; that is the thing all wise employers 
of teachers seek to secure above all else. In col- 
leges for men in New England it is absolutely 
imperative. In elementary and secondary schools, 
in colleges in other sections of the country, a 
teacher with serious defects of personality may 
be carried along by the momentum of the sys- 
tem, and the tact of superintendents and presi- 
dents. But in a men's college in New England a 
professor with seriously defective personality is 
simply impossible. The boys will either make 
him over into a decent man by the severest kind 

50 



THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 

of discipline, or else they will turn him out. I 
have seen them do both more than once. A man 
who is egotistical, insincere, diplomatic, mean, 
selfish, untruthful, cowardly, unfair, weak, is a 
person whom New England men students will 
not tolerate as a teacher. No amount of know- 
ledge and reputation, no amount of backing from 
the administration, can save him. On the whole, 
I am glad that this is so. It makes the responsi- 
bility of selecting professors tremendous. But, 
on the whole, it secures in the end a better type 
of man for college professors than we should be 
likely to get if the office could be held on any 
easier terms. 

Now, personality is very largely a matter of 
heredity. Some people are born large-natured ; 
other people are born small-souled. The former 
are born to succeed ; the latter are born to fail 
in any work in which personality counts for so 
much as it does in teaching. People with these 
mean natures and small souls never ought to try 
to teach. They ought to get into some strictly 
mechanical work where skilled hands count for 
everything and warm hearts count for nothing. 

51 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

Still, personality, though largely dependent 
on heredity, is in great measure capable of culti- 
vation. If it were not, it would be useless for 
me to talk about it here. Some teachers would 
be foreordained to succeed, others foreordained 
to fail ; and nothing but the process of natural 
selection after actual experience could separate 
those who are personally fit to teach from those 
who are not, and never can be. Our personality 
is largely an affair of our own making. Those 
who have weak points may, by thoughtfulness 
and resolution, strengthen them ; and those who 
are naturally strong, by effort may grow stronger 
still. How this may be done is what I am to 
try to tell. Fortunately, it is not a new story, 
but a very old one, at which the world has been 
working a long while. To our problem of per- 
sonality the world has found five answers : the 
Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonic, the Aristo- 
telian, and the Christian. I shall present these 
five answers in order. Some of you will doubt- 
less find that you can apply one of these princi- 
ples ; others will find another principle the one 
of which they stand in need. I shall not under- 

52 



THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 

take to make all that I say consistent. I shall 
be simply the mouthpiece of those five types of 
personality ; and leave the reader to select what 
he needs, and reject the rest as unprofitable. 
These five answers in brief are as follows : — 

The Epicurean says : " Take into your life 
as many simple, natural pleasures as possible." 
The Stoic says : " Keep out of your mind all 
causes of anxiety and grief." The Platonist 
says: ''Lift up your soul above the dust and 
drudgery of daily life, into the pure atmosphere 
of the perfect and the good." The Aristotelian 
says : " Organize your life by clear conception 
of the end for which you are living, seek dili- 
gently all means that further this end, and 
rigidly exclude all that would hinder it or dis- 
tract you from it." The Christian says: ''En- 
large your spirit to include the interests and aims 
of all the persons whom your life in any way 
aflFects." 

Any man or woman of average hereditary 
gifts, and ordinary scholarship and training, who 
puts these five principles in practice, will be a 
popular, effective, happy, and successful teacher. 

53 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

Any teacher, however well equipped otherwise, 
who neglects any one of these principles will, to 
that extent, be thereby weakened, crippled, and 
disqualified for the work of teaching. Any per- 
son who should be found defective in the ma- 
jority of these five requirements would be unfit 
to teach at all. Let us, then, take them in order, 
and test ourselves by them. First, the Epicurean. 

The Epicurean: Happiness 

The Epicurean gospel is summed up best in 

Stevenson's lines, " The Celestial Surgeon " : — 

If I have faltered more or less 
In my great task of happiness ; 
If I have moved among my race 
And shown no glorious morning face, 
If beams from happy human eyes 
Have moved me not ; if morning skies, 
Books, and my food, and summer rain 
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain — 
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take 
And stab my spirit broad awake : 
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 
Choose thou, before that spirit die, 
A piercing pain, a killing sin, 
And to my dead heart run them in. 

54 



THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 

The one thing in which the teacher on no ac- 
count must fail is this which Stevenson calls 
our "great task of happiness." The world is a 
vast reservoir of potential pleasure. It is our first 
business here, so says the Epicurean, for whom I 
am speaking now, to get at all costs, save that of 
overbalancing pain, as many of these pleasures as 
we can. Doubtless you will say, this is a very 
low ideal of life. Well, I admit that there are 
higher ideals, for the sake of which this ideal, to 
a considerable extent, must be sacrificed. I admit 
that the mother with a sick child, the scholar 
with a difficult problem, the statesman in a 
political campaign, — all of us, in fact, — ought 
to have higher ideals, and sacrifice thi« ideal of 
pleasure to them. But you cannot sacrifice it 
unless in the first place you have it, and care 
very much for it. 

If we grant that it is a low ideal, it is all the 
more shameful if we fall below it. And a great 
many teachers fall below it, and enormously di- 
minish their usefulness in consequence. What, 
then, is the Epicurean ideal for the teacher.? 
Plenty of good wholesome food, eaten leisurely 

55 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

in good company and pleasant surroundings. No 
hurried breakfasts of coffee and doughnuts ; no 
snatched lunches or dinners. A comfortable 
room where you can be quiet by yourself and not 
have to talk when you do not want to. Now, in 
the old days of boarding the teacher around, 
these things, perhaps, were not possible. But, in 
the long run, these fundamentals of a pleasant 
room and a good boarding-place are half the 
battle ; and before accepting a position a teacher 
should make sure that these fundamental requi- 
sites can be had. Don't save money by deny- 
ing yourselves these necessities when they can 
be had ; and don't stay long in any place where 
they cannot be had. No one can permanently be 
a good teacher without a background of restful 
quiet, and a basis of wholesome food. Next comes 
exercise in the open air. How many hours of 
every day do you spend outdoors, free from care, 
enjoying the sunlight, the fresh air, the fields, the 
flowers, the birds, the hills, the streams } To be 
sure, there are vocations which do not permit 
this. But the teacher, shut up in close air under 
high nervous tension for five or six hours, can 

56 



THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 

and must offset all this abnormality by at least 
an hour or two of every school day, and more on 
Saturday and Sunday, under the open sky, as 
care-free and light-hearted as the birds that sing 
in the tree-tops. Are you living up to your Epi- 
curean duties in this respect ? 

Of course you have games you are fond of play- 
ing. A teacher who works at such exhausting 
and narrowing work as instructing thirty or forty 
restless children, and does not counteract it by 
plenty of play, is not only committing slow sui- 
cide, but he is stunting and dwarfing his nature 
so that every year will find him personally less 
fit to teach than he was the year before. With 
walking, riding the bicycle, driving, golf, tennis, 
croquet, skating, cards, checkers, billiards, rowing, 
sailing, hunting, fishing, and the endless variety 
of games and sports available, a teacher who 
does not do a lot of them in vacations, and a 
good deal of them on half-holidays, and some of 
them almost every day, is falling far below the 
Epicurean standard of what a teacher ought to do 
and be. Play and people to play with are as 
necessary for a teacher as prayer for a preacher, 

57 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

or votes for a politician, a piano for a musician, 
or a hammer for a carpenter. You simply cannot 
go on healthily, happily, hopefully, without it. If 
I should learn of any candidate for a position as 
professor in Bowdoin College that he did and 
enjoyed none of these things, though he should 
be backed by the highest recommendations the 
leading universities of America and Europe could 
bestow, I would not so much as read the letters 
that he brought. For, however great he might be 
as a scholar, I should know in advance that he 
would be a failure in the teaching of American 
youth. There are probably just enough exceptions 
to this rule to prove its truth. But even those ex- 
ceptions, so far as I can think of them, are due to 
invalidism, for which the individuals at present 
are not responsible. Are you playing as much 
as Epicurus would tell you that you ought to 
play ? 

Do you sleep soundly, as long as nature re- 
quires, never letting the regrets of the day past 
nor the anxieties of the day to come encroach 
upon these precious hours, any more than you 
would that greatest of abominations — the alarm 

58 



THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 

clock ? Do you lie down every night in absolute 
restfulness, and thankfulness, and tranquillity ? 
Do you live in care-proof, worry-tight compart- 
ments, so that the little annoyances of one sec- 
tion of your life are never allowed to spill over 
and spoil the other sections of your life ? In 
short, to quote one who is our most genial mod- 
ern apostle of Epicureanism, do you recognize 
and arrange your life according to the principle 

that — 

The world is so full of a number of things 
I 'm sure we should all be as happy as kings ? 

Have you friends with whom you spend de- 
lightful hours in unrestrained companionship? 
Have you books which you read for the pure fun 
of it ? Do you go to concerts and entertainments 
and plays as often as you can afford the time and 
money? Take it altogether, are you having a 
good time, or, if not, are you resorting to every 
available means of getting one ? Then, not other- 
wise, will you pass this first examination as to 
your personal fitness to be a teacher. None of us 
are perfect on this point. None of us are having 
nearly so good a time as we might. But we ought 

59 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

to fall somewhere above seventy or eighty on a 
scale of a hundred on this fundamental question. 
Let us hereafter mark ourselves as rigidly on this 
subject as we do our scholars in arithmetic and 
geography. They are marking us all the time on 
this very point ; only they do not call it Epicu- 
reanism, or record the result in figures. They 
register it in slangy terms of their own likes 
and dislikes. 

The Stoic: Fortitude 

Second. Be a Stoic, which means keep your 
mind free from all worry, anxiety, and grief. You 
say, "That is impossible. The world is full of 
evils and we can't help worrying about them and 
being depressed by them." "Yes, you can," the 
Stoic tells us ; for things out there in the exter- 
nal world never trouble us. It is only when they 
get into our minds that they hurt ; and whether 
they shall be let into our minds depends entirely 
on ourselves. You make a mistake on Monday 
morning. That is an external fact to be acknow- 
ledged and corrected as promptly as possible. If 
it makes you nervous all Monday afternoon, and 

60 



THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 

takes away your appetite Monday evening, and 
keeps you awake Monday night, and starts you 
out on Tuesday morning* enfeebled, distrustful, 
and consequently ten times as likely to make 
mistakes as you were the day before, that is en- 
tirely your own affair and, if it happens, your own 
fault. You have allowed that external fact that 
ought to have been left in the outside world, 
where it belongs, to come in and take possession 
of your mind and drive out your normal mental, 
emotional, and physiological processes. 

Stoicism is fundamentally the doctrine of ap- 
perception applied to our emotional states. Stoi- 
cism says that our mental states are what we are, 
that no external thing can determine our mental 
state until we have woven it into the structure 
of our thought and painted it with the color of 
our dominant mood and temper. Thus, every 
mental state is for the most part of our own mak- 
ing. Of course this Stoic doctrine is somewhat 
akin to the doctrine of Christian Science. Yet 
there is a decided difference. Christian Science 
and kindred popular cults deny the external 
physical fact altogether. Stoicism admits the 

6i 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

reality and then makes the best of it. For in- 
stance, the Christian Scientist with the tooth- 
ache says there is no matter there to ache. The 
Stoic, both truer to the facts and braver in spirit, 
says there is matter, but it doesn't matter if 
there is. Stoicism teaches us that the mental 
states are the man ; that external things never, 
in themselves, constitute a mental state; that the 
all-important contribution is made by the mind 
itself; that this contribution from the mind is 
what gives the tone and determines the worth of 
the total mental state, and that this contribution 
is exclusively our own affair and may be brought 
entirely under our own control. As Epictetus 
says, "Everything has two handles, — one by 
which it may be borne, another by which it can- 
not. If your brother acts unjustly do not lay hold 
of the affair by the handle of his injustice, for by 
that it cannot be borne; but rather by the op- 
posite, — that he is your brother; that he was 
brought up with you ; and thus you will lay hold 
on it as it is to be borne." Again, he says men 
are disappointed " not by things, but by the view 
which they take of things. When, therefore, we 

62 



THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 

are hindered, or disappointed, or grieved, let us 
never impute it to others, but to ourselves, that 
is, to our views." All this, you see, is the funda- 
mental principle that the only things that enter 
into us and affect our states of thought, and will, 
and feeling are things as we think about them, 
forces as we react upon them ; and these thoughts, 
feelings, and reactions are our own affairs, and, 
consequently, if they are not serene, tranquil, and 
happy, the fault is in ourselves. 

Now, we can all reduce enormously our trou- 
bles and vexations by bringing to bear upon them 
this Stoic formula. There is a way of looking at 
our poverty, our plainness of feature, our lack of 
mental brilliance, our unpopularity, our mistakes, 
our physical ailments, that will make us modest, 
contented, cheerful, and serene. The blunders 
we make, the foolish things we do, the hasty 
words we say, though they, in a sense, have gone 
out from us, yet once committed in the external 
world they should be left there ; they should not 
be brought back into the mind to be brooded 
over and become centres of depression and dis- 
couragement. Stoicism teaches us to shift the 

63 



,THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

emphasis from dead external facts beyond our 
control to the live option which always presents 
itself within. It tells us that the circumstance 
or failure that can make us miserable does not 
exist unless it exists by our consent within our 
own minds. To consider not what happens to us 
but how we take it ; to measure good in terms 
not of sensuous pleasure but of mental attitude ; 
to know that if we are for the universal law of 
right, it matters not how many things may be 
against us ; to rest assured that there can be no 
circumstance or condition in which this great law 
cannot be done by us and, therefore, no situation 
of which we cannot be more than masters through 
obedience to the great law that governs all, — 
this is the stern and lofty law of Stoicism. 

Carried too far. Stoicism becomes hard, cold, 
proud, and, like its popular cults of to-day, 
grotesque. But there is a healing virtue in its 
stern formula after all ; and when things do not 
go as we should like, when people maltreat us 
and find fault with us, when we meet our own 
limitations and shortcomings, it is good for us to 
know that these external facts have no more 

64 



THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 

power to worry us and depress us and unfit us 
for our work than we choose to let them have. 

A teacher's hfe is probably more full of con- 
scious failure, personal collision, severe criti- 
cism, and general discouragement than almost 
any profession. The ends at which the teacher 
aims are vast and indefinite, the material is per- 
verse and recalcitrant, the resources available 
are often meagre, and the outcome is always far 
below what one would wish. But the Stoic for- 
mula, faithfully applied, will help us frankly to 
recognize these facts and at the same time to 
overcome them. We shall save ourselves many 
a troubled day and sleepless night if we learn to 
bring this Stoic formula to bear whenever these 
evils incidental to our arduous profession press 
too heavily upon us. 

The Platonic : Serenity 

The third of the world's great devices for the 
development of personality is Platonism. The 
Epicurean tells us to take in all the pleasure we 
can get. The Stoic shows us how to keep out grief 
and pain. But it is a constant strife and struggle 

6s 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

in either case. The Platonist bids us rise above 
it all. " The world," says the Platonist, "is very 
imperfect, almost as bad as the Stoic makes it 
out." We must live in this imperfect world after 
a fashion and make the best of it while it lasts. 
This, however, he tells us, is not the real world. 
Individual people and particular things are but 
imperfect, faulty, distorted copies of the true 
pattern of the good which is laid up in heaven. 
We must buy and sell, work and play, eat and 
drink, laugh and cry, love and hate down here 
among the earthly shades ; but our real conversa- 
tion all the time may be in heaven with the per- 
fectly good and true and beautiful. This doctrine, 
you see, is very closely akin to much of the popu- 
lar philosophy which is gaining so many adher- 
ents in our day. A little of it is a good thing, but 
to feed on it exclusively or regard it as the final 
gospel is very dangerous. These Platonists go 
through the world with a serene smile and an 
air of other-worldliness we cannot but admire; 
they are seen to most advantage, however, from 
a Uttle distance. They are not the most agreeable 
to live with ; it is a great misfortune to be tied to 

66 



THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 

one of them as husband or wife, college or busi- 
ness partner. Louisa Alcott had this type in mind 
when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a 
balloon with his family and friends having hold 
of the rope trying to pull him down to earth. 
Pretty much all of the philosophy of Christian 
Science, and a great deal that passes for Chris- 
tian religion, is simply Platonism masquerading 
in disguise. All such hymns as " Sweet By-and- 
By," '*0 Paradise, O Paradise," and the like 
are simply Platonic. Thomas a Kempis gives 
us Platonism in the form of mediaeval Christian 
mysticism. Emerson has a large element of Pla- 
tonism in all his deeper passages. In all its forms 
you get the same dualism of finite and infin- 
ite, perfect and imperfect ; unworthy, crumbling 
earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and 
the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in 
heaven. 

It is easy to ridicule and caricature this type 
of personality. Yet the world would be much the 
poorer if the Platonists and the mystics were 
withdrawn. The man or woman who at some 
time or other does not feel the spell or charm of 

67 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

this mood will miss one of the nobler experiences 
of life. 

In spite of this warning against Platonism 
accepted as a finished gospel, it contains truth 
which every teacher ought to know and on occa- 
sion to apply. When one is walking through the 
forest and knows not which way to go, it is a 
gain sometimes to climb a tree and take a look 
over the tops of the surrounding trees. The 
climbing does not directly help you on your 
journey, and, of course, if you stay in the tree- 
top you will never reach your destination ; but it 
does give you your bearings and insures that the 
next stage of your journey will be in the right 
direction. Now the teacher lives in a wilderness 
of dreary and monotonous details which shut out 
the larger horizon as completely as the trees of 
the forest. Every teacher ought, now and then, 
to climb the tall tree, or to leave the figure, to go 
away by himself and look at his life as a whole. 
A traveler in a Southern forest found an aged 
Hegro sitting with his banjo under a tree ten 
miles from the nearest settlement. In his sur- 
prise, he asked the Kfegro what he was doing off 

68 



THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 

there so far in the wilderness alone, and he re- 
plied, "I'm just serenading my own soul." Pla- 
tonism teaches us to get out of the bustle and 
tangle of life once in a while and serenade our 
own souls. We need, at times, to look at our- 
selves in the large, to make clear to ourselves the 
great purpose for which we are living, and the 
ideal of character toward which we aspire. We 
need to commune with the better self that we 
hope to be and take our bearings anew for the 
immediate journey before us. Most people get 
this Platonic refuge in religion ; some get it in 
music, some in art, some in intimate personal 
friendships. In some way or other every teacher 
should have some sphere of life apart from the 
daily routine in which he can dwell undisturbed 
and find everything serene, perfect, and complete. 
When one comes down, as come down one must, 
from these mounts of transfiguration, or, to use 
Plato's figure, " when one returns from the sun- 
light back into the cave," when one takes up again 
the duty and drudgery of life, though at first it 
will seem more impossible and irksome than ever, 
yet in the long run he will find a cheerfulness and 

69 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

serenity in the doing of these hard, homely duties 
which he never could have gained unless for these 
brief periods he had gone up into the summits 
where he sees the world as a whole bathed in 
unclouded sunshine. A teacher will hardly be 
able to keep his poise, his temper, and his cheer- 
ful outlook upon life without the aid in some form 
or other of these Platonic resources. Yet I must 
conclude this word about Plato, as I began, with a 
warning. It must be taken in moderate doses, 
and every added outlook and emotion derived 
from Platonic sources must be followed imme- 
diately by prompt and vigorous attention to the 
duties that await us at the foot of the mount. 
The mere Platonist who is that and nothing 
more, whether he call himself mystic, monastic, 
Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Theosophist, 
or Christian Scientist, must remember that, 
though he draw his inspiration from above the 
clouds, the real tests of life are found on the 
solid earth beneath his feet. The Platonist of 
all these types should take to heart the lesson 
conveyed in Stevenson's "Our Lady of the 
Snows. " 

70 



THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 

And ye, O brethren, what if God, 
When from heav'n's top he spies abroad, 
And sees on this tormented stage 
The noble war of mankind rage, 
What if His vivifying eye, 
O monks, should pass your corner by ? 
For still the Lord is Lord of might, 
In deeds, in deeds he takes delight; 
The plough, the spear, the laden barks, 
The field, the founded city, marks ; 
He marks the smiler of the streets. 
The singer upon garden seats ; 
He sees the climber in the rocks ; 
To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks. 

For those He loves that underprop 
With daily virtues heaven's top, 
And bear the falling sky with ease, 
Unfrowning caryatides ; 
Those He approves that ply the trade, 
That rock the child, that wed the maid, 
That with weak virtues, weaker hands, 
Sow gladness on the peopled lands, 
And still with laughter, song, and shout, 
Spin the great wheel of the earth about. 
But ye ? O ye who linger still 
Here in your fortress on the hill, 
With placid face, with tranquil breath, 

71 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

The unsought volunteers of death, 

Our cheerful General on high 

With careless looks may pass you by. 



The Aristotelian: Proportion 

The fourth great lesson of personality was 
taught the world by Aristotle. According to 
Aristotle, man is to find his end, not in heaven 
in the hereafter, but here and now upon the 
earth. The end is not something to be gained by 
indulgence of appetite with the Epicurean, by 
superiority to passion with the Stoic, by solitary 
elevation of soul with the Platonist ; the end is 
to be wrought out of the very stuff of which the 
hard world around us is made. From the Aristo- 
telian point of view nothing is good in itself; noth- 
ing is bad in itself. The goodness of good things 
depends upon the good use to which we put them, 
and the badness of bad things depends likewise 
on the bad use to which we put them. 

From this point of view personality depends 
on the sense of proportion. This sense of pro- 
portion is the most essential part of a teacher's 
equipment. Every teacher has opportunity to do 

72 



THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 

twenty times as much as he is able to do well. 
The important thing is to know which twentieth 
to do and which nineteen twentieths to leave 
undone. Between mastery of subjects taught, 
general reading, professional study, exercise, re- 
creation, social engagements, personal work with 
individual scholars, private affairs, correspond- 
ence, the regular work of the classroom, the cor- 
recting of papers, preparation of particular lessons, 
church, clubs, there is obviously far more draft on 
the teacher's time and strength than can be met 
with safety. Teaching is an extra-hazardous pro- 
fession, so far at any rate as the nervous system 
is concerned. Into each of several of these lines 
one might put his whole energy and still leave 
much to be accomplished. The teacher's problem, 
then, is one of proportion and selection, to know 
what to slight and what to emphasize. The ele- 
ments that enter into the problem are different 
in each person. Consequently, no general rules 
can be laid down. The teacher should have a 
pretty clear idea of what he means to do and be. 
That which is essential to this main end should 
be accepted at all costs ; that which hinders it 

n 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

should be rejected at all costs. When the choice 
is between things which help it more and help it 
less, those which help it more should be taken, 
and those which help it less should be rejected. 
The teacher should learn to say "No!" to calls 
which are good in themselves, but are not good 
for him. For instance, amateur theatricals are 
good in themselves ; but no teacher who is 
teaching five or six hours a day can afford to 
give three or four evenings a week to lengthy 
rehearsals. Church fairs are good in themselves, 
but the wise teacher will leave the management 
of such things to persons who have much more 
leisure. Church attendance on Sunday is a good 
thing in itself, but one service a day is as much 
as the average teacher can attend who would do 
his best the five working days of the week. Sun- 
day-school teaching is an excellent thing in it- 
self, but as a rule it is the one thing above all 
others from which the conscientious public-school 
teacher will most rigidly refrain. For Sunday- 
school teaching puts the teacher on what should 
be the chief day of rest into precisely the same 
state of nervous tension that must be maintained 

74 



THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 

during the greater part of the week. Sunday- 
school teaching for a public-school teacher is very 
much the same misuse of Sunday that taking in 
a big Sunday washing would be for a washer- 
woman who had washings to do on all the other 
six days of the week. Making out absolutely ac- 
curate rank and reading carefully all the written 
work of a large class of pupils is a good thing in 
itself; but wise superintendents will save their 
teachers as much of that work as possible, and 
teachers themselves will understand that if any- 
thing is to be shirked this is the best place to 
economize nervous force. Of course, if it is done 
at all, it must be done honestly. But the differ- 
ence between rapid glancing and quick final judg- 
ment in such matters, and minute perusing and 
prolonged deliberation in each case is of little ad- 
vantage to the pupils in the long run, and is often 
bought at excessive cost of vitality and strength 
of the teacher. Emphasize essentials, slight non- 
essentials. Do the thing that counts. Leave things 
that do not count undone or get them done 
quickly. Remember that physical health, mental 
elasticity, and freshness and vivacity of spirits 

75 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

must be maintained at all costs in the interests 
of the school and the scholars no less than as a 
matter of imperative self-preservation. The wise 
teacher will say to himself, *'I must know the 
lessons I teach." *'I must do some reading out- 
side." "I must take an interest in my individual 
scholars." "I must keep myself strong and happy 
and well." "These are essential, and for the sake 
of these things I stand ready to sacrifice all mere 
red tape." "I stand ready to be misunderstood 
by good people who know nothing of the strain 
I am under." "I stand ready even to shirk and 
to slight minor matters when it is necessary to 
do so in order to do the main things well." In 
the great name of Aristotle, then, resolve to ob- 
serve and apply this fundamental sense of pro- 
portion. Be sure that what you do is right for 
you, under the circumstances in which you are 
placed, with the definite obligations that are laid 
upon you. Never mind if you do not do every- 
thing that other people expect you to do ; if you 
do not do things which, though good in them- 
selves and right for other people to do, in your 
specific situation for you would be wrong. In 

76 



THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 

other words, have your own individual ends per- 
fectly clear, and accept or reject the various calls 
that come to you according as they further or 
hinder these clearly grasped individual aims. 

The Christian: Devotion 

Now, we have four bits of advice from four 
of the world's greatest teachers. There remains 
the counsel of the greatest teacher of all. Christ 
says to the teacher, "Make the interests and aims 
of each one of your scholars your own." Whether 
a teacher is a Christian in the profoundest sense 
of the term depends not in the least on whether 
he is a Catholic or a Protestant, a Conservative 
or a Liberal. It depends on whether the teacher 
has his own point of view, his personal interests, 
and then regards the scholars as alien beings to 
be dealt with as the rules of the school may re- 
quire and as his own personal interest and repu- 
tation may suggest ; or whether in sympathy 
and generous interest he makes the life and 
problems of each scholar a genuine part of the 
problem of his own enlarged nature and generous 
heart. The greatest difference between teachers, 

; .% 77 






THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

after all, is that in this deepest sense some teach- 
ers are Christians and some teachers are not. 
The teacher who is not a Christian according to 
this definition will work for reputation and pay, 
— will teach what is required and rule the school 
by sheer authority and force. Between teacher 
and scholar a great gulf will be fixed; the only 
bridges across that gulf will be authority and 
constraint on the part of the teacher, fear and 
self-interest on the part of the pupils. Such a 
teacher will set tasks and compel the scholars 
to do them. Here such a teacher's responsibility 
will end. 

Precisely here, where the unchristian teacher's 
work ends, is where the Christian teacher's best 
work begins. Instead of imposing a task on the 
scholars, the Christian teacher sets before schol- 
ars and teacher alike a task which they together 
must do ; the teacher is to help each scholar to 
do it and each scholar is to help the teacher to 
get this task done. It is a common work in which 
they are engaged. If they succeed it is a common 
satisfaction ; if any individual fails it is a com- 
mon sorrow. The Christian teacher will be just 

78 



THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 

as rigid in his requirements as the unchristian 
teacher, but the attitude toward the scholars is 
entirely different. The unchristian teacher says 
to the scholars, " Go and do that work : I shall 
mark you and punish you if you fail." The Chris- 
tian teacher says, "Come, let us do this work 
together; I am ready to help you in every way I 
can, and I want each of you to help me." The 
Christian teacher looks forward to each pupil's 
future, and enters sympathetically into the plans 
which the child has for himself and his parents 
have for him. 

Now undoubtedly this Christian attitude to- 
ward each scholar is pretty expensive of the teach- 
er's time and strength. Doubtless, hitherto you 
have thought me very selfish, hard-hearted, and 
parsimonious in the counsel I have been giving. 
I have told you in the name of Epicurus to get 
all the pleasure you can ; in the name of the 
Stoics to shut out all superfluous griefs and worry; 
in the name of Plato to get above petty details 
and live a life of your own, apart from mere hum- 
drum routine; in the name of Aristotle to develop 
a sense of proportion, to shirk and slight and ex- 

79 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

elude a thousand distractions that are well enough 
for other people, but which you cannot afford. 
But in giving all this selfish, hard-hearted, coolly 
calculated advice, I have asked you to save your- 
selves for this Christian work, which is the best 
worth while of all. Pour yourselves unreservedly, 
without stint or measure, into the lives of your 
scholars. See things through their eyes ; feel 
keenly their joys and griefs. Be sure that you 
share in sympathy and helpfulness every task 
you lay upon them ; that you rejoice in every 
success they achieve, and that you are even more 
sorry than they for every failure they make. Be 
a leader, not a driver, of your flock : for to lead 
is Christ-like, to drive is unchristian. The differ- 
ence, you see, between the teacher who is a Chris- 
tian and the one who is not, is not a difference 
of doctrine or ritual or verbal profession. It is a 
difference in the tone, temper, and spirit of the 
teacher's attitude toward the scholars. It is a 
hard thing to define, but it is something an ex- 
perienced person can feel before he has been in 
a class-room five minutes. In one class-room you 
feel the tension of alien and antagonistic forces, 

80 



FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 

— the will of the teacher arrayed against the will 
of the scholars, and, as an inevitable consequence, 
the will of the scholars in latent antagonism to 
the will of the teacher. In another class-room 
there is tension, to be sure, as there ought to 
be, but it is the tension of one strong, friendly, 
united will of teacher and scholar directed against 
their great common tasks. The Christian spirit 
alone, without sufficient mental equipment and 
force of will, will not teach school any more than 
it will manage a factory or win a game of football 
without technical training and equipment. All 
this, however, I am taking for granted. Assum- 
ing these general qualifications, it may be safely 
said that every teacher who combines the five qual- 
ities we have been describing will find teaching a 
perpetual joy and will achieve a brilliant success. 

Five Principles of Personality 

Such are the five principles of personality as 
the world's great teachers have developed them 
and as they apply specifically to the work of the 
teacher. Show me any teacher of sufficient men- 
tal training and qualifications who is unpopular, 

8i 



THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 

ineffective, unhappy, and I will guarantee that 
this teacher has violated one or more of these 
five principles of personality ; either he has ne- 
glected diet, exercise, rest, and recreation, and 
failed to have a good time ; or else he has wasted 
his nervous substance in riotous worry, and spent 
the energy needed to make things go right to- 
day in regretting what went wrong yesterday or 
anticipating what may go wrong to-morrow; or 
else he has no life of his own outside of the school 
and above it, from which he comes down clothed 
with fresh inspiration and courage to meet the 
duties and details of each new school day ; or else 
he has missed the great sense of proportion, and 
squandered the energies which should have been 
devoted to the few things that are needful, on a 
variety of burdens which the importunity of others 
or the false conscientiousness of himself had laid 
upon him ; or else, and this is by far the most 
common and serious cause, he has failed to 
merge his own life in the lives of the scholars, 
so that they have felt him a helper, a leader, a 
friend in the solving of their individual problems 
and the accomplishment of their common work. 

82 



FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 

On the other hand, I will guarantee perfect per- 
sonal success to any well-trained teacher who will 
faithfully incorporate these five principles into 
his personal life. The teacher who is healthy and 
happy with Epicurus nights and mornings, holi- 
days and vacations, at meal-time and between 
meals ; who faithfully fortifies his soul with the 
Stoic defenses against needless regrets and super- 
fluous forebodings ; who now and then ascends 
with Plato the heights from which he sees the 
letters of his life writ large, and petty annoyances 
reduced to their true dimensions ; who applies the 
Aristotelian sense of proportion to the distribu- 
tion of his energy, so that the full force of it is 
held in reserve for the things that are really worth 
while, and, finally, sees in the lives of his scholars 
the supreme object for which all these other ac- 
cumulations and savings have been made, and de- 
votes himself j oyf ully and unreservedly to the com- 
mon work he tries to do with them, for them, and 
through them for their lasting good, — this teacher 
can no more help being a personal success as a 
teacher than the sunlight and rain can help making 
the earth the fruitful and beautiful place that it is. 



L 



OUTLINE 

I. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY IN SCHOOL 

THE PERSONALITY OF THE PUPIL 

1. The development of personality as the teacher's 

task I 

2. The five stages in our educational system ... 2 

3. The different forms of school interests .... 3 

THE PRIMARY SCHOOL: SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE 

INTERESTS 

4. Eager interest and immediate satisfaction in pri- 

mary teaching 4 

5. The strengthening of the child's will through in- 

terest 8 

6. Discipline by compulsion is abnormal but neces- 

sary 10 

THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL: ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED 

INTERESTS 

7. The weighting and choosing of competitive in- 

terests 14 

8. The function of artificial encouragements ... 15 

9. The special value of the manual activities ... 16 
ID. The worth of special and frequent promotions . 17 
II. The teacher's power to stimulate joy in achieve- 
ment 19 

8s 



OUTLINE 

THE HIGH SCHOOL: ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 

12. The need for discovering the youth's individual 

self 20 

13. The adolescent is readily influenced through his 

aptitudes 23 

14. The power of a devoted and purposeful teacher . 24 

THE COLLEGE : SOCIAL INTERESTS 

15. The college develops a social will 25 

16. The curriculum as a means: (i) literature, 

(2) philosophy, history, and political science, 

(3) the physical sciences 26 

17. Student life as a resource 29 

18. The dangers of the college spirit 30 

19. The social attitude may be developed below the 

college 32 

20. The best substitutes for college 36 

THE UNIVERSITY: PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 

21. The university stimulates reverence for truth . 38 

22. The professional spirit demands expert com- 

mand of a subject 40 

23. The place of research in the university .... 40 

24. The misdirected training of the doctor of phi- 

losophy 41 

25. Scholarship and presentation in the teacher's 

profession 42 

FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 

26. The overlapping of stages and interests ... 43 

27. The five tests of a good teacher 43 

86 



OUTLINE 

II. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY OUT OF 

SCHOOL 

THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 

1. Differences in personality among teachers ... 49 

2. The parts played by heredity and cultivation . . 51 

3. Five historic types of personality 52 

4. The importance of typical attitudes in the teacher 53 

THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 

5. The importance of happiness 54 

6. Some specific Epicurean duties 55 

7. The necessity of play to the teacher ..... 57 

8. Rest and recreation 59 

THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 

9. The Stoic keeps his mind free from care ... 60 

10. Stoicism is the doctrine of apperception applied 

to emotional states 61 

11. The special need of the teacher for a Stoical 

attitude 6s 

THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 

12. Other-worldliness as a refuge from ills .... 66 

13. The limitations of this attitude 67 

14. Its supplemental worth in life 68 

THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 

15. The goodness of things is a matter of use ... 72 

16. The sense of proportion an essential equipment 

in teachers 72 

17. The necessity for selection and rejection in a 

busy life 73 

87 



OUTLINE 

THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 

i8. The sharing of the scholars' problems » . . . yy 

19. Two types of teachers 78 

20. The teacher as a leader of children 80 

FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 

21. The absence of these principles makes for failure 

and unhappiness . 8r 

22. These five principles of personality are a surety of 

success 83 



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